Skiing is a popular sport. However, skiing requires natural snow, which can be formed only under certain climatic conditions, e.g., the environmental temperature is very low. Consequently, skiing on natural snow is subjected to the restrictions of environmental temperature and seasons. Especially, the operation time of a ski resort is restricted by environmental temperature, seasons, and snow fall; in addition, the cost and workload required for creating trails are huge. Therefore, the income of a ski resort is severely affected by those factors.
In a ski resort, usually a snow making apparatus is used to make snow from water, and then the man-made snow is used to pave trails, in order to mitigate the effect of environmental temperature and seasons and increase the amount of snow. That approach consumes water and energy heavily, requires a long snow making time, and is costly; in addition, it is still severely subjected to the restrictions of environmental temperature and seasons.
At present, besides that dominant approach, there are two other approaches that can solve the problem of availability of natural snow, in order to mitigate the restrictions of environmental temperature and seasons on skiing and enable enjoying the pleasure of skiing more conveniently.
One approach is to utilize the grains of an organic material that can absorb water and thereby inflate to produce artificial snow. To improve the similarity of such artificial snow to natural snow, in some technical solutions in that approach, an organic cross-linking agent is added in the producing process to improve the aggregation among the grains, and inorganic substances (e.g., talcum) are added to improve the fluidity of the grains. However, such an approach still consumes water heavily and involves a complex producing process, and the features of the artificial snow obtained in that approach are not satisfactory; in addition, a problem of water evaporation is involved.
The other approach is to utilize a solid material rather than water to simulate the features of trails formed by natural snow. In some technical solutions in that approach, the grains of an organic material are mixed with a solid lubricating agent to produce artificial snow, the solid lubricating agent rendering certain adhesiveness and fluidity among the grains. In some other technical solutions, an artificial apparatus is used to simulate the feeling of skiing. For example, a solution skiing on plastic brushes, the so called “skiing-on-brush”, is to lay brushes made of a macromolecular material (e.g., nylon) piece by piece at an appropriate location (e.g., on a slope), and slide on the brushes by means of a ski-board. As other examples, in some solutions commonly known as “skiing-on-mushroom”, the head of each of the elongated elements of its brushs similar to the above-mentuioend brushes is fabricated to have an arc shape. All of these technical solutions can be generally referred to as dry skiing. However, the feeling and effect of skiing that can be provided in the existing approaches in the prior art are quite different from those provided by skiing on natural snow; in addition, both the production and use are complex, and trails produced in such approaches can't be used as natural snow trails.
At present, snow is still mainly produced from water in ski resorts in order to increase the amount of snow, and the application scope of the two alternative approaches described above is very limited. Up to now, there is no alternative approach that can't be used to produce artificial snow on a large scale yet. Hence, there is an urgent need for developing a technique for producing artificial snow, which can simulate the features of natural snow well and is simple to produce and convenient to use, on a large scale from materials other than water.